Northlanders #21
Northlanders #21 kicks off 'The Plague Widow,' widely regarded as the strongest arc in Brian Wood's Viking anthology and one of the most formally ambitious historical comics published under the Vertigo imprint. By centering the series' longest arc to that point on a female protagonist — Hilda, a widow fighting to protect her daughter inside a quarantined Rus settlement on the Volga — Wood pushed Northlanders beyond its early sword-and-slaughter reputation and into territory closer to literary survival fiction, demonstrating the format's capacity for psychological complexity and feminist-inflected storytelling. The issue also marked Northlanders' first sustained engagement with the Varangian Rus culture of what is now Russia, expanding the series' geographic and thematic scope well beyond Scandinavian shores. Leandro Fernández's stark, wintry visual language — all pale ground, black trees, and bodies floating in the Volga — established an aesthetic benchmark against which subsequent arcs were measured.
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The arc's creative DNA traces directly to notes Brian Wood had accumulated for a prose novel about the Black Plague; finding that genre already crowded, he transposed the material to Northlanders, switching the capital-P historical plague for a fictionalized outbreak that fit the A.D. 1020 Rus setting. Wood conducted research fieldwork in Oslo at the Folk Museum, photographing period structures, and hand-drew a rough city map for Fernández — a South American artist new to the book — so both collaborators shared a consistent spatial understanding of the settlement where all the action unfolds. Editor Mark Doyle shepherded the issue, and Wood has said in a 2010 DC blog post that Northlanders was, at the time, the title where he felt creatively at his peak, pointing to 'The Plague Widow' as a prime example of the risks he was by then confident enough to take.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Hilda (the 'Plague Widow'), her daughter Karin, the enforcer Gunborg, and the priest Boris — all original characters debuting in this issue.
- Written by Brian Wood; art by Leandro Fernández (his Northlanders debut); colors by Dave McCaig; letters by Travis Lanham; edited by Mark Doyle — published by DC/Vertigo, cover-dated December 2009, on-sale October 28, 2009.
- Launches the longest arc in the series at that point: 8 issues (#21–28), running through July 2010.
- Setting is a Rus Viking settlement on the Volga River in A.D. 1020 — the first Northlanders arc set in what is now Russia, exploring the cultural blending of Norse, Slavic, and Middle Eastern influences among the Varangian Rus.
- The arc originated from Wood's unpublished prose-novel notes on the Black Plague, reworked into a fictionalized comic-book outbreak after Wood determined the prose genre was too saturated.
- Wood made a research trip to the Folk Museum in Oslo, Norway, photographing period architecture, and provided Fernández with a hand-drawn settlement map to ensure visual consistency across the arc.
- Collected in Northlanders Vol. 4: The Plague Widow (Vertigo TPB, October 2010, ISBN 978-1401228507, 192 pages) and later reprinted in Northlanders, Book Three: The European Saga (2017 omnibus, ISBN 978-1401265083).
- The series overall ran 50 issues under Vertigo (December 2007 – April 2012); 'The Plague Widow' arc sits at the midpoint, representing the series' expansion from Scandinavian-focused tales to continent-wide Viking-Age stories.
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Reprints
↩ Reprints Luna Park #[nn] (2010)
Reprinted in Northlanders #4 (2010), Northlanders #3 (2018)
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